Sky tonight
Sky Tonight is an all-rounder app that helps you navigate the moon, stars, planets, constellations, comets, asteroids and satellites in the night sky. With its augmented reality mode, you can simply point your phone at the sky and locate celestial bodies in real time. Easily filter objects that appear on your screen based on their brightness along with gaining fresh information about new activity through their ‘What’s New’ section. Set calendar reminders for specific solar events, along with learning the best time to view the sky based on weather conditions and visibility from this app.
Available on: iOS and Android
Stellarium
Stellarium acts as a planetarium built right into your phone that helps you gauge and observe celestial bodies with ease. Its sky simulation presents an accurate depiction of the night sky based off of the date, time and location you’ve picked. The lens of the app can observe objects ranging from a base model of magnitude 8 that goes right up to magnitude 22. The app lets you track satellites, zoom in on deep sky images and set schedules for gazing at the sky both during morning and evening to help you get the best results.
Available on: iOS and Android
Star tracker
With a collection of over 8000 stars and constellations from the solar system, Star Tracker is an app that’s designed to function on all screen sizes. With its data functioning even when you’re offline, you can allow GPS to automatically track your location or even feed it manually. Due to its cutting-edge signal processing technique, the app is able to present smooth motion flow and quick response. Enabling the retina display of the device gives you incredibly high-quality results and the app lets you switch to night mode as well to adapt better to your stargazing patterns.
Available on: iOS and Android
ISS detector
The ISS Detector app helps you keep a track of the location of the International Space Station in the night sky. The app notifies you just a few moments before it’s about to pass your coordinates, along with calculating weather and visibility conditions to ensure you get a clear sighting. Besides the ISS, the app also helps you track other significant objects like the Hubble Space Telescope and other bright satellites, complete with transmitter information and real-time Doppler frequencies.
Available on: iOS and Android
Sky map
Designed as an in-built window to the night sky, this app helps you navigationally track and understand a lot about objects in the sky such as stars, planets, nebulae and more. The design of the app works in a way where you can simply point your phone up at the sky, ensure your GPS location is fed correctly and follow the compass on your screen to locate celestial objects. Apart from reflecting current locations, the app also lets you track and see the past travel activity of any particular celestial body.
Available on: Android
